UC4H RangeFinder II: VL53L1x

UC4H RangeFinder II: VL53L1x
2. Feb. 2019

http://www.olliw.eu/2018/uavcan-for-hobbyists-blog/

I have added now support of the VL53L1X range finder to the UC4H RangeFinder firmware. The uc4h.Distance message came in very handy here, and I had to do only minor modifications to BetaCopter. Gladly ArduCopter 3.6, on which BetaCopter is based, supports already two rangefinders, so doing flight tests with both a TFMini and a VL53L1x installed was easy.

The VL53L1X works nicely in my indoor bench tests, it is substantially more noisy than the TFMini though. In my flight tests (of course done outdoors) it however produced essentially unusable data. I could only find very few reports on practical tests of the VL53L1X, but it seems that its poor outdoor performance was observed before (see here). A bit disappointing.

I’ve also designed a little PCB for a UC4H VL53L1X node, I just need to build 9 of them now

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